Lost and found_ a novel - Alan Dean Foster [15]
Straightening from picking up another good throwing stone to add to his growing collection, he happened to look up and off to his right. What he saw made him drop the couple of rocks he had already accumulated.
The wonderfully convincing lakeshore and distant mountains that had filled that portion of his enclosure had vanished. In their place was, incongruously, a slice of what appeared to be an urban alley. Not a very clean or prosperous one, either. Garbage cans, some vertical and some not, shared space with high dilapidated fences of concrete block and wood slat. Graffiti covered both. Telephone and power poles with lines leading nowhere lined one side of the alley. Like a dead rhino, the rusted and scavenged-out hulk of a thirty-year-old Cadillac dominated the classically urban scene.
Captivated, he rose and moved toward it. Noting the spot on the ground where the restraining field normally flowed, he halted. Extending a cautious hand, he reached out toward the nearest piece of wooden fence that now magically adjoined his own enclosure. Nothing shocked him; nothing stopped him. Here, and for now, the field had been deactivated. The fence felt real beneath his fingers: old, weathered wood, full of splinters and bent nails. There was more graffiti, crude and challenging, far from the spray-paint chic favored by the bored and self-indulgent New York arts intelligentsia. He recognized but could not interpret the gang code.
In the depths of the dead Cadillac, something moved. Walker hesitated, wanting to rush forward, to embrace whomever it was who might also have been abducted along with him. Natural caution held him back. A glance to his right showed that the corridor was still empty. But they had to be watching, or at least recording what was happening. Of one thing he was certain: this section of restraining field had not been deactivated accidentally. Therefore this imminent encounter had been planned. An experiment of some sort, he decided bitterly. Or perhaps, just perhaps, a reaction to his extended crying jag and visible depression.
A shape began to emerge from the rusting skeletal hulk of the decrepit luxury car. Let it be a homeless woman, he entreated silently. Someone with whom to share his isolation and misery. Someone to talk to besides unresponsive aliens. Even a hobo, even a drug addict sleeping it off. Anyone, someone!
Then he saw that the shape was not human.
3
He did not burst out crying at the apparent disappointment. Neither did he take flight, wide-eyed and afraid. Instead, he just stood and stared as the solitary inhabitant of the car wreck nonchalantly ambled toward him. It had two eyes, like him. It had two ears, like him. It had hair, more than him. It had a tail, not like him, and it advanced at a comfortable trot on all fours.
The dog was a mutt, a forty-pound lump of canine insouciance that looked as if it had been sired by a drunken sea lion who had copulated with an industrial-sized bale of steel wool. Fearless and unafraid, the dog came right up to him, tongue lolling to one side, tail wagging, and sat down.
It wasn’t a beautiful eighteen-year-old runaway, he reflected ruefully. It wasn’t even a strung-out junkie. But it was alive, and homey-familiar, and of Earth. It was company, though not of the sort he had hoped for. Privately, he found himself envying the mutt. Unencumbered by higher powers of cogitation, it might even be enjoying its new surroundings. Or rather, its transplanted familiar surroundings. Just as he, Walker, had been taken whole and intact along with a copy of his immediate environment, so apparently had the pooch. It might wonder why it could not stray beyond a certain line without being shocked, but doubtless its confusion and bewilderment were mitigated by a steady supply of food and water. Walker wondered